"The Holy Land Offers You Its Products": The Transformation of Palestinian Handicrafts During the British Mandate

Arriving inside the vaulted archway of the American Colony commune and hostel in Jerusalem at the start of the British Mandate, Christian pilgrims, government officials, and tourists alike were greeted with tiled panels featuring flowering vines and trees painted in shades of cobalt, turquoise, and green. Emulating classical Ottoman decorative patterns, the panels were produced in 1923 by the Armenian ceramicist David Ohannessian, who had arrived in Jerusalem five years earlier as a refugee under the aegis of the Pro-Jerusalem Society (PJS). Founded in 1918 by Jerusalem’s first military governor and directed by British Arts and Crafts enthusiast Charles Robert Ashbee, the PJS aimed to be the “creative” and “pacific” arm of the British military government through a dual focus on architectural preservation and the establishment of self-sustaining handicraft industries. This paper investigates how the handicrafts most promoted by the PJS—ceramics, glass, and weaving came to represent modern Palestinian culture in tourism settings during the British Mandate. From their placement within rarefied tourist spaces within Palestine (such as, the American Colony, King David Hotel, and Y.M.C.A.), to their status as international “ambassadors” in British colonial exhibitions and world’s fairs, the handicrafts nurtured by the PJS highlighted a tension among mandate authorities to emphasize Palestine’s Judeo-Christian history, while preserving its Ottoman-Islamic past. This aesthetic tension reflected the fundamental political contradiction in the British Mandate’s charter: how to endorse the Jewish ethnonational project in Palestine, as outlined in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, while supporting Palestine’s Arab Muslim majority?